When it keeps its promises, audience targeting can be the best friend a digital marketer ever had.

By enabling digital marketers to precisely select who sees their company’s online ads -- and bid those ads accordingly and cost-effectively -- audience targeting can help drive motivated consumers to a company’s website, capture the flag in the search engine marketing race and seize a healthy ROI on campaign spending.

However, as your digital marketing team may have already discovered, audience targeting can be a tricky beast to master.

Why? With a wide variety of publishers on the market and an increasing number of digital marketing tools available -- like demographics, similar audiences, in-market audiences and CRM data -- determining which combination of them works best for each campaign can be a complicated, time-consuming task. That’s especially true for companies looking to stand apart in today’s hyper-connected, uber-competitive global business environment.

Start With The Basics, Then Fine-Tune Your Strategy

How can your digital team take control of audience targeting? Start with the basics. The polar opposite of a “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” approach, audience targeting lets you focus on -- and connect with -- specific audience groups. That’s why it’s important to begin each campaign by identifying which specific people you want to reach, what content you want to share with them, and when and where you do.

Once you’ve grasped the basics, you can then start to build custom combinations and fine-tune creative for your audience groups (or even exclude certain audiences). Based on what we’ve learned in helping scores of companies launch successful digital marketing campaigns across the world, here are three key tactics to gain confidence, precision and cost-effectiveness when it comes to audience targeting: